Lessons from Khamenei

The elimination of the Iranian leader changes the system of expectations of authoritarian elites in Russia and the world

While observing events in Iran, I decided to ask the AI ​​how often over the past 200 years the army of one state has physically killed the head of another state. To my surprise, the inhuman mind found only one such case for the years 1825–2025 - the storming of Amin’s palace in 1979. There was also the President of Paraguay, who died in 1870 in a war with foreign countries. The AI ​​could not find any other examples that met the strict criteria of murder by foreign military personnel, namely the head of an internationally recognized state, no matter how much I tortured it.

Most often, current heads of state were killed by rebels and conspirators; less often they took their own lives. In very rare cases, they were arrested and tried by the forces of other states. Some coups and rebels received direct support from outside, but the destruction of the incumbent ruler was almost always carried out by internal forces. Regular armies killed many heads of self-proclaimed territorial entities or rebel groups, leaders of terrorist organizations and drug cartels, leaders of tribal unions and proto-states during colonization. But the assassination of a recognized head of state is a very unusual event. Even on a two-hundred-year horizon.

It is not worth building a trend based on one point, and theoretically, recent events may remain a rare exception. However, there is one more circumstance that has nothing to do with Iran.

The rapid development of electronic surveillance, precision weapons, and drones of various types has dramatically increased the technical feasibility of assassinating high-ranking individuals.

In exactly the same way as Khomeini today, in 1986 they tried to eliminate Muammar Gaddafi, at least twice - Saddam Hussein, and more than once - the leaders of the Taliban (when they were in power). But then nothing worked, and over the past five years it has suddenly worked many times, even in relation to well-protected figures.

Until recently, the situation was even worse with attempts to eliminate foreign leaders through intelligence operations. According to the results of the investigation conducted by the Church Commission in the US Senate, the CIA developed more than a hundred plans to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Several dozen of them were put into implementation. However, Castro died a very old man, a natural death. This is just one of dozens of examples of a deliberate attempt to assassinate a foreign leader in the 20th century or to stage a coup from outside. If you read not the texts of conspiracy theorists, but real archival documents, then you can find cases where the widespread distribution of resources to various opponents of the regime helped eliminate or overthrow the head of a foreign state by the forces of his internal enemies, but the ratio of successful and unsuccessful attempts to completely orchestrate such actions from the outside was almost one in a thousand in the 20th century.

For centuries, the main thing that heads of state and the upper stratum of the elite of authoritarian countries had to fear was each other. In rare cases - total defeat in the war. However, the loss of life required to inflict a total defeat on a distant authoritarian regime tended to be unacceptable to most external actors.

The development of technology has created a fundamentally new situation. Given total technological superiority (and the United States has it in relation to most authoritarian regimes), today it has become technically possible to destroy from the outside not only the authoritarian leader personally, but also a group of senior officials of many countries at the same time.

The presence of an opportunity does not mean that it will be realized. Both sides can play in the physical destruction of a leader, and leaders of democratic countries objectively need to be in public much more often than their authoritarian colleagues. Trump, who survived several assassination attempts and may have believed in his destiny as a result of miraculous rescues, is the exception rather than the rule. However, for further reasoning, it does not matter to us how often such actions will be reproduced in reality.

Let us confine ourselves to the fact that over the course of two months, the elites of authoritarian countries were twice clearly demonstrated the fundamental possibility of eliminating the first person by external forces at relatively low costs to the latter.

Representatives of the elites at a personal level are good at reading potential threats (those who do not read them are rarely retained among the elites) and unwittingly try a similar development of events on their own countries. Now I’m not so much talking about Russia, but about any authoritarian regimes in which, even if there are formally prescribed rules for the transit of power, there is no stable tradition of actual compliance with such rules.

Elites’ thoughts about the prospects for the sudden liquidation of their head of state by external forces can have two logics: clan and ideological.

If key clans perceive the current reign as indefinitely long, then holding formally significant positions equidistant from key clans or technical figures may be acceptable or even desirable. If the sudden death of an authoritarian leader in the near future suddenly begins to seem more likely, then the importance of control of constitutionally significant positions by clan representatives increases. In Venezuela, if you remember, power passed to a figure who, before Maduro’s arrest, was far from the most influential, but now suddenly has acquired real powers.

Ideological logic looks different. Among the representatives of the elite there are always many opportunists and pragmatists who can support the official rhetoric in words, but deep down in their hearts do not share the beliefs of the first person and do not support his individual decisions. In particular, I have no doubt that a significant part of the Russian elite considers the war in Ukraine to be a mistake, and some consider the confrontation with the West in general to be a mistake. In addition, different groups within the elite bear different risks in the event of a sudden regime collapse. In particular, in the event of the fall of the regime in Iran, the personal prospects of the conditional IRGC general, who led the bloody suppression of protests, and the prospects, for example, of the head of the Iranian Central Bank are noticeably different.

In conditions of simultaneous targeted elimination of several representatives of the ruling elite at once, it is possible not only to significantly change the balance of influence between the ruling clans, but also the ideological orientation of the ruling system as a whole. It is not so important whether it will actually be possible to achieve something similar in Iran, but rather the fact that both the heads of individual authoritarian states and those elite groups whose risks in the event of the fall of the regime will inevitably think about such a prospect are maximum.

It is important for many authoritarian leaders to preserve their ideological heritage, and the most “bloody” representatives of the elite will receive additional incentives and arguments to attack their competitors who are less covered in the crimes of the regime.

The considerations described above will contribute to the development of two processes: an attempt to bring the distribution of constitutionally significant posts for transit into line with the actually existing inter-clan balance and a weakening of the positions of moderate technocrats with the growing influence of ideologically charged or most criminally charged regimes of elitists. The scale of the described phenomena in each individual country is a controversial and not obvious issue. However, there is little doubt that recent events in Iran and Venezuela will push many people's thoughts in this direction.

It is not so important how much the probability of sudden death of the leaders of individual countries has actually increased; it is important that representatives of their elites begin to think more about this probability. And these thoughts can provoke the most unexpected consequences.